Scott Pilgrim is a purée of 2010: a portrait of nerdy hipsters that captures the zeitgeist. Not that I would EVER use that word

I didn’t love Scott Pilgrim vs the World as much as most of my friends – most of them male, whatever that’s worth –who declared that they would be seeing it “infinity times,” studying it and relishing it over and over for the rest of their lives. Scott Pilgrim captured them exactly, they said, like it came from within them and made their path clear: to locate a quasi-geeky girl with big eyes and weird hair, woo her, and mate with her forever. And also play video games. I didn’t love it quite as much as all that.

But Scott Pilgrim is, unequivocally, a masterpiece from director Edgar Wright. It’s funny, it’s quick, it moves and breathes: even the smallest details are meticulously, flawlessly tended to. And it’s painfully current – the kind of film that begs you to use the term “zeitgeist” (which I will NOT). Scott Pilgrim feels like a puree of 2010 (or, more specifically, being twentysomething in 2010) reduced over medium heat and injected directly into the aorta: irony, sincerity, nerdy hipsters, hip nerds, all turned on their heads and back again, all drenched in 8-bit nostalgia for a 1980s childhood.

Michael Cera (as usual, stammering personified) stars as the titular Pilgrim, an aimless-but-unconcerned Torontonian who falls in love with mysterious new girl in town Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). In order to date Ramona, he soon learns, he must defeat – literally, in battle – her seven evil exes. Scott Pilgrim is a male fantasy, albeit our new, sensitive, cardigan-clad, borderline-feminized version of masculinity. The Michael Cera school of masculinity. The fact that these exes have any claim whatsoever over Ramona’s life goes unexamined, and the creepy proprietariness of it chafes my feminist hide a bit. But Scott Pilgrim’s hero’s journey zips by (possibly just a couple of evil exes too long) like a comic book and a video game and a movie and Jason Schwartzman had sex and a baby came out. I’m curious to see how that baby grows up.